Evolutionary theory does a great job of explaining why finches evolved to fill many different ecological niches for birds in the Galapogos, or even how Australopithecus Africanus could have given rise to more modern hominids and eventually, us. It does a much less credible job of explaining quantum shifts, like the rise of warm-bloodedness or multicellular animals, or the actual origin of life. While a biologist would say that mutation accounts for these, the problem is that a mutant has to be interfertile, genetically dominant, and competitively advantageous for mutated traits to be passed on and prosper, which is a combination so vanishingly rare that I doubt if a concrete and documentable example of that actually happening could be found.
The vast distance between humans and their nearest competition is not that hard to explain, though. Opinions differ as to what the key change was - speech, tool use, opposable thumb, social structure, brain size, or just the synergistic effect of all of them together* - but some combination of those put us off to the races around 100,000 years ago, and without them, nothing else is catching up and nothing else would have the breathing room to do so anyway, since we weren't competing against another species that was already on top of the hill.
*(There's a school of thought that none of them individually really conferred that much of an advantage for the environments that existed when and where they are thought to have first occurred, but put together they created an unbeatable edge. Wolves, for instance, do extraordinarily well at coordinating hunts without actual speech, but they were never in the running for taking over the planet. There are interrelation questions too, like did the thumbs get so developed because we were already using tools and better thumbs made more successful tool users, or were they just an adaptation for climbing that turned out to be extraordinarily useful for making and using tools, and then got only modestly changed from there over the last quarter-million years?)
I don't know Tanker, all kinds of strange shit happens.
We once thought only humans were tool makers until the last 30 or so years when scientists have found some animals who do use tools, branches or sticks to seek out food.
Check out Numbers 25-32. The Bible speaks often of a race of Giants decedent's of the Anakim a race of Giants.
Coincidental a few months ago a tomb was found with a skeleton of a man that had to have been well over 10 feet tall.
In Mongolia years ago a tomb of a man, a very large man with red hair and Caucasian was found buried century's before Any Caucasians ever got that far east. [ As far as we know]
We know He did but how did he get there and who buried him ?
Have to remember people of that time had little technology lived in a mud hut and used stone implements, so the "story's " from people who had seen with their own eyes and passed on to others had to be translated in their minds at least to something supernatural.
The Old Testament has so far as science is concerned used to map the story's of the Ancient ones-- and by golly, much that was reported at that time has a basis in fact.
Then the fact that most cultures tell of huge beasts, dinosaurs ? I can see the people of Indonesia believing in them they do exist, the Kyoto dragon is a fact today, but why people in other parts of the world would even have story's and art forms that celebrate a look alike creature is beyond me.
The Hindu are interesting, their myths or religion has been written down for 4,000 years, may be a bit warped by our standards but they tried to record what they themselves saw.
Saw a documentary of scientists in the African Jungle where there was a swift flowing river with lots of rocks. In order to cross the river the scientists used walking sticks to keep their balance. After a few weeks of going back and forth across the stream one of the scientists was fortunate to get video of a Gorilla wanting to cross and picking up a stick to use as the humans did to cross safely.
Tanker my frigging cat learned from watching me how to turn the kitchen faucet on and tries to get into closed rooms by messing with the door knobs.
Tanker read Genesis carefully with an eye to science and what these people of the time saw but had to interpret into what they could not understand.
Then there is DNA------ science says some of it is JUNK But that just means they do not know where that strand comes from or how to link it to humans.
